The Maldives – A place you DO need to visit before you die!

The information I am writing is from personal experience of my visit to The Maldives in 2003. All photographs were taken by myself or partner, nothing you see are stock photographs.

I must state this because looking at the Maldives content on Steemit I see photographs that have been published many times, these are not.

During June 2003 I was fortunate enough to visit The Maldives on a 3 week vacation and chose Bandos Island resort as our destination.

This was before the great catastrophe that was a Tsunami in 2004. I have no idea if it has been restored to its former glory.

After a stopover in Dubai, we landed in the main ‘city’ of Male which is really a large town with an airstrip. This, of course, is not the final destination and not what we see in all those fantastic beach shots. The next step was to jump on a speedboat with white leather seats and shoot off to Bandos Island resort, fantastic!

You may think 3 weeks on an island is paradise and it is, but if visit make sure you take PLENTY of entertainment. I’m talking about books, magazines, music. There’s ONE shop on the island and you may or may not be able to get a newspaper to keep in touch with the outside world.

This place is remote and almost completely cut-off from the outside world. You can walk around the entire circumference in 20 minutes, we did it several times.

The inner part of the island is for the workers and staff. It contains everything that is required to please the guests and sleeping quarters. It is also cordoned off to guests.

The rooms do contain a TV, but that’s as far as it goes for entertainment. If you love sitting in the sun all day then it’s wonderful but we did end up counting the days down before leaving sad to say. That’s why I must emphasize, bring much to do!

During my stay, I attended a diving course and gained my PADI Open Water certificate. This place is a diver’s paradise. Near vertical reefs, loads of coral, big fish including sharks (I did see one).

The beaches really are deserted for the most part. The resort can only house a certain amount of guests and as you can see from the aerial view of this island, it's sand all around.

There is one main restaurant; The holiday is all-inclusive so you must eat there or starve. I can’t remember getting fed up of the food although I guess this could happen to some.

We did do a couple of trips, one to ‘Male’ the capital where we saw some of the architecture, the fish markets, and a lot of souvenir shops where you can be pestered into giving up your money for trinkets. Truth be told, there isn’t anything really to buy, its all about the islands.

The other was a Night Fishing trip which I can recommend. The details are quite sketchy as this was 15 years ago, but I do remember catching something quite large. The seas are full of aquatic creatures, its just isn’t hard to get some results.

There is some land wildlife on the island too. I got this great shot of a lizard who didn’t seem very scared of me at all.

Sometimes I just wanted to hang around, and very often did.

The sunsets? Just look at the MAIN post picture. I took this at dusk and there was no shortage of views every night just like this.

I have done a lot of traveling on my years, seen many places but have many more to visit. This is the most beautiful place I have ever seen. You simply must go before you die!

This is a STEEM reprint of a post from almost 2 years ago.. - Not much chance of going anywhere these days besides watching the dog empty his bowels yet again during my 'daily exercise'. Oh... the highlight of the day!

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